A quieter, more contemplative life, one punctuated only by the scraping of chairs after a leisurely lunch and the wind rustling through the lavender fields… Sara Clemence

We have a lot of fun changes coming to our blog in the next few weeks, and we sincerely hope all of you will join us at the table for great conversations, recipes and more. Some of the more astute may have already noticed that our name has evolved from ‘Eat Till You Bleed’ to ‘Pistou and Pastis’. Pistou and Pastis perfectly captures our life at the moment, and reflects the impossible to fight gravitational pull of all things southern France for us. As I grow older, my desire to slow life down, enjoy the simpler moments and sip pastis in the golden sunshine, nibbling on tapenades with good friends is what truly sparks me.

‘“My guiding motto for 50 years has been simpleness, the French peasant cuisine is at the basis of the culinary art. By this I mean, it is composed of honest elements that la grande cuisine only embellishes. For example, when I prepare an elaborate dish, say one that takes several days, all the ingredients are basically simple, and the cooking is simple. There are no tricks, no attempt to disguise the true taste by overuse of wines or condiments. What it requires is patience. One must avoid the temptation to hurry, to use substitutes.” – Alexandre Dumaine

During my life time, there have been many chefs I have idolized. I studied their lives trying to comprehend what made them tick, much like a student of music might study a great composer. I read the great chefs’ cookbooks cover to cover like a novel; I devoured any and all articles I could find written about them; I ate in their restaurants if I could afford it; I even cooked their dishes and featured them on my menus; anything, just anything to try to glean one small piece of their culinary perspective and philosophy and incorporate it into my style….

General Tso’s chicken did not preexist in Hunanese cuisine,but originally the flavors of the dish were typically Hunanese — heavy, sour, hot and salty.

– Chef Peng Chang-kuei

Lisa and I just finished watching the fascinating documentary “In Search of General Tso’s Chicken”. I found it so interesting not so much for the study into the origins of one of America’s most iconic ‘Chinese’ dishes, but because it confirmed my long held belief of why American Chinese food is so damned sweet. Chinese immigrants realized we Americans have a cultural sweet tooth and add copious quantities of sugar to our food to make it loved. The issue and reasonings are far more in depth and complex, but will also shed a lot of light on the story of Chinese immigration in America. The persecution Chinese immigrants were subjected to relates a recurring storyline in America that has happened with many different ethnic group. In some ways, it could be the story of Muslims today.

The side effect of watching was I went on an all out Chinese food marathon shortly after. One dish I ‘created’ was a take on General Tso’s chicken. Perhaps Chef Peng Chang-kuei, the man credited with creating General Tso’s Chicken, would be rolling in his grave if he knew of my spin on his classic Hunanese dish. I couldn’t help it, all the ingredients were just sitting around at my house waiting t be part of something epic.

Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life. – Georges Blanc

I used to worship quite a few famous chefs when I first began my cooking career. I believed by studying and role modeling the chefs I idolized, I could glean bits of information and techniques to add to my growing repertoire. Georges Blanc was a perfectionist chef who really spoke to my sensibilities. One bite conveyed the story of his family’s long culinary heritage, the products of his region, a strong sense of seasonality and an essence of simple purity. Virtues I strived to incorporate into the foundation of my personal cooking style….

A recipe is rather like a piece of music. Although the notes may be read and reproduced faithfully the result can still be crude, mechanical or just uninteresting.

Roger Verge

Notes from My Fictitious Mazet

Recently I bought a home in Vancouver, Washington and found myself with the unenviable task of having to move yet again. Hopefully for the last time but who really knows. If I did my calculations correctly, at best I shall be carted off to the nursing home drooling uncontrollably in a snug pair of Depends by the time the last house payment is paid. At worst, I will be found by bill collectors thoroughly mummified with a glass of pastis in one hand and a tartine of tapenade in the other….

I recently returned from the 11th annual Alsace Festival in Northern California and wanted to share my speech about food and wine pairing I gave before a sold out crowd at the technical conference. The following is a slightly revised version.

Good Morning, I’m here to speak about Food and Wine, or more specifically, how food impacts wine and vice versa. Matching food and wine is about marriages and contrasts. We will explore taste to see how food and wine work together from a chef perspective. I am going to begin with a brief history of myself, followed by general food and wine pairing tips, then figuring out what taste is from a chef’s perspective and finally tasting some wines together….

I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. ‘If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.

Jacques Pepin

Many years ago, in fact decades ago, I was a young culinary student at the New England Culinary Institute. In between classes us young guys and gals liked to pretend we knew more than we did. Over beers, we would boast about how many pans we could control at once in the saute station or how many crepes we could flip. None of of us knew shit. The ignorance of youth. Sometimes it takes real experience to learn how little you actually know. All of us consulted Jacques Pepin’s book “La Technique” as if it were the bible. I still cherish my original copy that has been splattered with chicken fat and lobster juices over the course of it’s 30 year life. It was the bible for us.

Since getting backed on my kickstarter cookbook project I have been in full panic mode. I have so much work to do to finish the book in time to get it to Torrey Douglass, our phenomenal book designer, to get it to our publisher, to get it to those of you who graciously bought copies and backed my project. A rather shameless plug for my book is right here:bit.ly/KickstartSunshine. You are encouraged to still back my kickstarter campaign as we have set a stretch goal to cover a possible book tour. Many thanks….

“A barn raising, also historically called a “raising bee” or “rearing” in the U.K., describes a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.” – Wikipedia

The Good Old Days… My mother on my father’s lap with her best friend Nicole

No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing. – Julia Child

My mother came from an upper middle class family that lived in the south of France. The extent of her food education before meeting my father was learned by eating in restaurants like Oustau de Baumaniere in Provence, Pieds de Cochon in Paris or having her father’s cook Mémé make dinner nightly. When my mother came to America and first married my father she didn’t know how to cook. Ironically, she learned by reading Julia Child’s seminal book ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’. Through Julia, she was reunited with her mother culture and proudly fed us a different meal every single night (my father’s requirement). My first moments in the kitchen, hanging on my mother’s cliched apron strings, were spent pretending to be a more French version of Julia. I grow up adoring Julia and watching her TV shows. Today, I still love her and reference her books on a daily basis. …

When the weather starts to heat up, my taste buds board a plane and venture to the South of France. Grab a pastis and join me for a taste of Summer. Coastal Provence is an area long renowned for it’s golden sunlight and soul satisfying fare. A cuisine largely rooted in seafood and vegetables with flavorful condiments like rouille and tapenado that enhance everything they touch. The dish tapenade is derived from tapeno, the Provencal word for capers. Charles Meynier, chef of the bygone Marseille restaurant La Maison Doree, invented tapenade in 1880. …

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” – Joel Salatin

For the past year we have lived more “locally” and ‘in the season’ than ever before. It wasn’t an act of intentional culinarian defiance or even a misguided political statement. It was just the continued evolution of what we have done for the better part of the last decade. Without intending to, our families diet has been hyper seasonal, consuming a wider range of vegetables more intensely. I used to ponder at length why vegetables just tasted so much better in France than here. Eat at almost any restaurant or stop at any town market, buy something and you’ll see and taste what I mean. Zucchini tastes like the perfect zucchini and carrots like the perfect carrot. How could one country do that consistently across the board. Than it hit me like an errant lightning strike on a bright sunny day. Food grown and eaten in due season simply tastes better….

The sheep farmer showed up at work with a lamb head wrapped in plastic and questioned whether there was a call among the Chef community for it. It brought me back to my short stage in Joel Robuchon’s Paris kitchen in 1996. I remember a dish I was drawn to like a moth to a flame. Chef Robuchon slow braised a pig’s head and served the meat stacked artistically on a plate with baby vegetables in a mustard and tarragon sauce. Every part was utilized: the cheeks, the tongue, the ears and the brain. It encapsulated Chef Robuchon’s approach to Michelin three star cooking. Use simple, humble ingredients and elevate their stature on the plate with seemingly simple presentations. Cuisine Actuelle is what he termed his approach….

Everyone who works in the restaurant business knows some of the best, most creative meals take place in the kitchen far away from the limelight and paying customers. I have bore witness to some crazy, inventive shit only a slightly stoned cook could ever dream of. I also have seen epic fails where it required all my diplomatic skills to prevent the premature death of the guy who made it. The fact is, kitchen folk love to eat decadent delicious food. Maybe it’s the trade off for all the long hours we spend working together in grueling heat, producing amazing food for you to dine on. Fat adrenaline junkies. One of the most memorable was Keith’s short rib pizza. He ladled liberal quantities of horseradish bechamel onto a base of our chewy fermented rye pizza crust and topped it with a splattering of spoon tender beef short ribs and molasses-bacon jam. It was dusted with aged Manchego cheese and freshly microplaned raw horseradish. The first time he made it, we ate our entire mise en place of short ribs and had to quickly prep more for the next day. Seriously, my nipples get hard at the mere thought of it. …

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys (chefs)Don’t let ’em pick guitars (knives) or drive (cook on) them old trucks (ranges)Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and suchMamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys (chefs)‘Cause they’ll never stay home and they’re always aloneEven with someone they love

~ Ed and Patsy Bruce

Chef Beaumont

I always feared Beau would follow my flour dusted footsteps into the kitchen. It’s not any kind of life anyone should wish upon their offspring, especially ones they love. That might sound a dire proclamation coming from a guy who spent over half his lifetime sweating in hot kitchens pretending to be a Chef. Cooking professionally is a hard knocks life riddled with unimaginable strife I would not wish upon anyone….

WARNING: This post is not for the faint of heart, nor any vegans who may not have fully understood the title of my blog page and it’s full implications. Good Ramen is serious porky business.

I start my blog with a confession. I have been a confirmed ramen addict for several decades now. The disease shows no signs of slowing even though, for the most part, I have stopped eating gluten and pork. The addiction began in earnest as a small child left to fend for himself and forage the near empty cupboards of 1970’s America. Instant ramen noodles seemed the perfect cost effective solution for parents of constantly hungry adolescents. Any child with half a brain could boil a cup of water, open the tin foil flavor packet, drop the waxed noodles in and eat. It progressed, or degressed depending on your point of view, to high school where I put the high in high school and had the munchies that needed constant tending. Ramen was the perfect solution….

We arrived back in Epernay with a sense of foreboding a soldier must feel when returning to the scene of a particularly horrendous battle fought only the day before. I had imagined Epernay’s streets haunted by the ghosts of empty bottles from yesterday’s excesses. The bright, relentless sunlight bore a hole through my aching brain….

Many years ago I graduated from the prestigious New England Culinary Institute run by Michel LeBorgne, a hard nosed French Chef from Northern France. Like every great Chef before him, and probably every one since, Chef LeBorgne had his aphorisms we lived our lives by. They were repeatedly drummed into our thick skulls as we chopped vegetables, sauteed fish and made stocks. Every one growled required the standard ‘oui Chef” shouted back in unison like raw recruits at boot camp. Most were modified from the classic themes of how older generations had it much harder than us young punks. ‘We were so poor as apprentices, we only had one pair of shoes between the two of us” or “I used to walk to the restaurant uphill both ways.” The one that stuck and became part of my own repertoire was “I lost my first million in the garbage can”. That line inspired me throughout my career and helped maintain very low food costs and run a tight ship. Even now, decades later I am still guided by that principal….

Thirty years of professional cooking took a heavy toll on my body and I needed to change or face dire consequences.

Recently we changed our eating patterns to tremendously positive results, both intended and not. I know that’s probably the most unexpected first line of a post featuring a picture of a big plate of profiteroles crammed full of creamy Turkish coffee ice cream drenched in a thick stream of hot chocolate sauce, but it’s true. Thirty years of professional cooking took a heavy toll on my body and I needed to change or face the dire consequences. The constant binge eating of whatever was within six inches of my fingers coupled with scarfing down massive plates of pasta before service was unhealthy at best. If I didn’t mend my ways I wouldn’t see my son reach manhood let alone puberty….

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Why Pistou and Pastis?

Pistou is a very simple, rustic soup made with whatever is at hand, and evokes the very spirit of Provence in every bite. There is no one single recipe to adhere to, rather it is a joyous celebration of whatever is in season and inspires you to share your table with friends.

Pastis, on the other hand, is an integral part of daily life that encourages laughter and merriment, and fuels our imagination on dreary Pacific Northwest days when we are at home dreaming of lavender, laughter and golden sunsets.

We hope Pistou and Pastis acts as a metaphor to inspire home cooks to be more free and fearless in the kitchen, and to use the seasons like other people use cookbooks.

Week by week, we will share beautiful dishes made with what what we found at the farmers market. Sometimes the pastis will inspire a long dialogue, other times simply a great recipe quickly posted to share. Foods that profoundly touch your soul, are one of the many treasures of life.

Francois, Lisa et Beaumont

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Meet Chef Francois

François grew up in a very French household in Chicago. His earliest attempts at cookery began with the filleting of his sister’s goldfish at age two and braising his pet rabbit at age seven. Eventually he stopped cooking his pets and became a Chef. Read More…